(Hoek and Brown 1997;Hoek et al. 2002) for rock engineering applications has prompted a number of researchers to develop three-dimensional versions, in which the predicted major effective principal stress at failure is dependent on the intermediate effective principal stress, in addition to the parameters in the existing 2DHB failure criterion. Threedimensional versions of the 2DHB failure criterion have been proposed by Pan and Hudson (1988), Priest (2005) and Zhang and Zhu (2007). Zhang (2008) presented a generalised version of the Zhang-Zhu criterion. Melkoumian et al. (2009) presented an explicit version of the 'comprehensive' Priest criterion. Conventionally, in the literature, each criterion has been named after the author(s) who first described the criterion; this convention will be adopted here. It is likely that additional new three-dimensional versions of the HoekBrown criterion will be developed over the next few years.
BackgroundThe most recent generalised version of the 2DHB failure criterion is introduced by Eberhardt and Rahjoo (this volume). This version of the Hoek-Brown criterion is here referred to as 'generalised' because the key parameters m b , s and a can take any general values to allow the application to intact rock and to rock masses. The paper explains how the parameters m b , s and a for a fractured rock mass can be estimated from empirical expressions.